accurate when it counts – 1 - university of...
TRANSCRIPT
Accurate When It Counts – 1
Accurate When It Counts: Perceiving Power and Status in Social Groups
Sanjay Srivastava
University of Oregon
Cameron Anderson
University of California, Berkeley
Draft date: December 21, 2009
To be published in J. L. Smith, W. Ickes, J. Hall, S. D. Hodges, & W. Gardner (Eds.),
Managing interpersonal sensitivity: Knowing when—and when not—to understand
others.
Accurate When It Counts – 2
Accurate When It Counts:
Perceiving Power and Status in Social Groups
Several years ago, one of us came across an advice book titled 30 Things
Everyone Should Know How To Do Before Turning 30 (Adcock, 2003). Said milestone
having already passed, your correspondent was interested in knowing what crucial age-
appropriate expertise he did or did not possess, intending to brush up if needed. Amid
instructions on how to change a car tire (check), open a Champagne bottle (check), and
fold a fitted sheet (really?) was a chapter on how to win the affections of cats and dogs
that you have just met.
The key to interacting successfully with cats and dogs, apparently, is to
understand the two questions that the animal most cares about, and then to provide a
suitable answer. And it turns out that cats and dogs are interested in very different things.
For cats, who are solitary hunters, the two key questions are “What the hell is that?” and
“Is it mine?” (Hence cats’ endless fascination with laser pointers.) But for dogs, highly
social animals that run in packs, the two key questions are “Who is dominant?” and
“Who likes me?”
These questions resonated with this particular reader on both a personal and
professional level (and not just because he is more of a dog person). A recurring theme in
psychology and other social sciences is that two similar dimensions organize much of
human interpersonal life. These dimensions recur under a variety of different names and
in different theoretical contexts, including agentic and communal modalities (Bakan,
1966), power and intimacy motivations (McAdams, 1985), status and love concerns in
relationships (Foa & Foa, 1974), dominant and affiliative dimensions of personality
Accurate When It Counts – 3
(Wiggins, 1991), competence and warmth in stereotype content (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, &
Xu, 2002), and strategies for “getting ahead” and “getting along” in the social world
(Hogan, 1983). In a more abstract sense, the two recurring dimensions can be represented
spatially as a vertical dimension, representing positions over or under one another in a
hierarchy, and a horizontal dimension, representing interpersonal closeness or distance.
In social and personality psychology, a great deal of attention has been paid to the
horizontal constructs – topics like closeness, intimacy, social support, etc. Vertical
constructs have often been further in the background, as an important theme in research
on intergroup processes and bases of social stratification like race, gender, and class. In
recent years, however, there has been a growing emphasis among psychologists in
conducting more explicit, basic research on vertical constructs like power, status, and
influence (e.g., Fiske & Berdahl, 2007; Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003).
Humans, perhaps as much as dogs, are interested in knowing who’s in charge in
social situations. Our goal in this chapter is to consider how well people do at answering
that question – figuring out the relative placement of self and others along vertical
dimensions like power and status. We begin by reviewing definitions and critical
conceptual issues in power and status, and we discuss how the hierarchical organization
of power and status makes them different from horizontal constructs and from other
attributes (like Big Five personality traits). We next consider different criteria and
definitions for what it means to be “accurate” in perceiving power and status. Next, we
report empirical findings on the accuracy of perceptions of status in small groups,
showing that people are often quite good at perceiving the status of both self and others.
Finally, we discuss the functions and consequences of accurate and inaccurate
Accurate When It Counts – 4
perceptions of power and status, and address motivational factors that can increase or
decrease accuracy. Our core assertion is that individuals who misperceive their place in a
hierarchy will face social costs; these costs provide an incentive to perceive others and
the self accurately.
Power, Status, and Other Vertical Constructs
Power, status, and related constructs are of great interest across the social sciences
and humanities, so it should be of little surprise that there are a multiplicity of definitions
and conceptual frameworks for studying them. Our goal in reviewing definitions is not to
adjudicate a single best one for all purposes, but rather to draw out important issues and
themes, and then to develop useful working definitions for interpersonal perception
research.
Power
An important distinction among many definitions of power is that of “power-
over” versus “power-to” (Allen, 2005). Power-over emphasizes the interpersonal
components of power, as in power over another person. By contrast, power-to
emphasizes an ability or capacity for action. For example, the marketing campaign for
SAS (a software package for statistical analysis) touts that “SAS gives you the power to
know.” This slogan is an illustration of power-to do something asocial (understand your
data) but not necessarily power-over another person. Social and personality psychologist
study power-to under a variety of other headings, such as research on self-efficacy and
locus of control. Typically the term “power” is more commonly used in research on
social structures and interpersonal relations, where the focus is on power-over (as is the
case in this chapter).
Accurate When It Counts – 5
A useful taxonomy of power-over definitions commonly used by social and
personality psychologists was presented in a review by Fiske and Berdahl (2007). They
identified three main themes among various definitions: power as influence, power as
potential influence, and power as outcome control. If power is defined as influence, that
means that a person with power causes another person to behave in a particular way. If
power is defined as potential influence, that means that a person with power has the
capacity or potential to cause another person’s behavior (whether or not that potential is
exercised). If power is defined as outcome control, that means that a person with power
has control over outcomes that another person values.
Fiske and Berdahl noted a number of conceptual and practical problems with
defining power as influence or potential influence. First, actual influence can only be
determined after the fact, which is problematic for building empirically testable theories.
Second, influence (both actual and potential) implies that a target person behaved or
would behave in a way that complies with a powerful person’s desires. Such a definition
of power omits important situations where a powerful person may exercise power over
someone who does not comply, such as when a leader punishes a subordinate for
disobedience. Third, actual or potential influence definitions do not address where the
influence comes from, and thus leave “influence” as merely a placeholder in defining
power.
For these reasons, Fiske and Berdahl concluded that outcome control is the most
conceptually defensible way of understanding power. Therefore, they defined power as
“relative control over another’s valued outcomes” (p. 679). The outcome-control
approach draws heavily on interdependence theory (Emerson, 1962; Kelly & Thibaut,
Accurate When It Counts – 6
1978; Rusbult & Van Lange, 2003), which provides a broader theoretical framework for
understanding power in social relationships.
The outcome-control framework is useful for studying perceptions. Outcome
control is a structural property of relationships that does not depend on any person’s
construal of a situation. Thus, one person may have power over another person even if
one or both people do not realize it at a given time. (For example, a late-night TV host
and the female intern he dates might both think about their relationship in purely
romantic terms, but the fact that the host makes decisions about the intern’s salary and
career advancement means that he has power over her). Because the outcome-control
framework separates psychological processes such as the perception of power from
power per se, it is conceptually coherent to ask questions about the accuracy of
perceptions.
This definition of power also makes clear that power is defined relative to a
particular social situation. Power in one situation might be correlated with power in
another situation (possibly due to stable structural variables like gender or class).
However, such cross-situational consistency would be an empirical finding, not a
definitional necessity as may the case with personality traits (Funder & Colvin, 1991).
Status
A construct closely related to power is status. In organizational and social
psychology and in sociology, “status” generally refers to the respect and prestige one has
in the eyes of others (e.g., Anderson, Srivastava, Beer, Spataro, & Chatman, 2006;
Berger, Cohen, & Zelditch, 1972).1 It is possible to generate examples where power and
status are dissociated: for example, a figurehead leader may have high status but little
Accurate When It Counts – 7
power, and conversely a CEO’s secretary may have a great deal of power to control
outcomes within the organization but relatively little formal status. In many practical
instances, however, power and status will be closely coupled.
Like power, status is a feature of a relationship (Fiske & Berdahl, 2007). Like
power, status may vary from one situation to another. And like with power, it is possible
for a single individual to misperceive her own status or the status of another person.
However, because status is about respect and prestige in the eyes of others, at its core it
involves collective perceptions – that is, status is a component of reputation. Thus status
is socially constructed in a different and perhaps more fundamental way than power.
Whereas it might make sense to say that an individual has power but nobody knows it, it
would not make sense to say the same about status. This gives status a complicated but
necessary relation to interpersonal perceptions, which will become important when we
consider what it means to be accurate in perceiving status.
Other Vertical Constructs
We can also briefly define several other vertical constructs that are related to
power and status. As already discussed, influence is the capacity to affect others’
behavior. In many situations an individual with power (in the sense of outcome control)
can use that power to exert influence over others (Fiske & Berdahl, 2007). Thus influence
is often a consequence of power. Trait dominance refers to stable individual differences
in a tendency to seek and exercise power, status, or influence (Gough, McCloskey, &
Meehl, 1951); in the Big Five trait taxonomy, dominance is most strongly correlated with
extraversion (John & Srivastava, 1999). Drawing on literature on social inequalities, we
can define privilege as discrepancies based on group membership, such as race or gender
Accurate When It Counts – 8
or class, that result in better outcomes and greater outcome control for members of one
group than for another (Lowery, Knowles, & Unzueta, 2007; McIntosh, 1988). Thus,
dominance and privilege can be personal or structural antecedents to power.
Hierarchical Organization of Power and Status
As we have defined them, power and status are intrinsically social. Power is a
structural feature of relationships, concerning the control that one person has over another
person’s valued outcomes. Status is a reputational variable, concerning how one person is
viewed in the eyes of others. Power and status share this intrinsic sociality with
horizontal dimensions like closeness and liking. However, power, status, and other
vertical dimensions have particular characteristics that make them distinct.
In group contexts, power and status are typically arranged into hierarchies (Owens
& Sutton, 1999; Savin-Williams, 1979; Sluckin & Smith, 1977). If too many individuals
try to make decisions, issue commands, and dominate discussions, the group can
encounter problems in trying to coordinate action. Hierarchies solve this problem by
dividing influence and rights among group members: higher-status individuals have more
freedom to make decisions and act on them, whereas low-status individuals are expected
to defer to others (Goffman, 1967; Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003). Higher power
and status also come with greater rewards, such as a greater share of credit for a group’s
success. Hierarchies thus create a structure that rewards individuals who contribute to a
group’s success (Berger et al., 1972; Thibaut & Kelly, 1959).
An idealized power or status hierarchy is linear and transitive, meaning that if A
is higher than B and B is higher than C, then A is higher than C (de Vries, 1998). To the
extent that a real-world hierarchy approximates this idealized structure, advancement
Accurate When It Counts – 9
through the hierarchy will be zero-sum: for C to rise up, B must fall down. This makes
power and status quite different from horizontal dimensions like closeness.
Empirical evidence shows that real-world groups do approximate this idealized
structure. Along vertical dimensions, individuals tend to spontaneously organize
themselves into differentiated positions (Tiedens & Fragale, 2003); by contrast,
individuals tend to converge toward similar positions along horizontal dimensions
(Markey, Funder, & Ozer, 2003). Furthermore, people derive more satisfaction and
cooperate more effectively in dyadic and group relationships that follow a pattern of
vertical differentiation and horizontal convergence (Dryer & Horowitz, 1997; Horowitz
et al., 2006; O’Connor & Dyce, 1997; Tiedens & Fragale, 2003).
The hierarchical organization of power and status also suggests a particular
pattern of entanglement between self-perceptions and perceptions of others. An
individual who perceives the self as relatively high up in a hierarchy and who acts on this
belief may consequentially treat others as relatively lower (Blau, 1964). This suggests
that inaccurate perceptions of power or status can have objective consequences in a social
situation. These consequences may be asymmetric. An individual who self-enhances
(views the self as having higher power or status than is warranted) can provoke conflict
and disorganization if the individual tries to claim the rights and rewards of a high
position. By contrast, an individual who self-effaces (views the self as lower than
warranted) will be less socially disruptive, though he or she may leave rewards on the
table (Anderson et al., 2006). These tradeoffs and asymmetries are at the core of our
predictions about how and why people will be motivated to perceive status accurately.
Defining Accuracy for Power and Status
Accurate When It Counts – 10
What does it mean to be “accurate” in an interpersonal perception? Researchers
have wrestled with this problem for a long time (e.g., Cronbach, 1955; Funder, 1995;
Kenny & Albright, 1987; Kruglanski, 1989; Robins & John, 1997). Broadly, the accuracy
of a perception can be defined as the correspondence between the perception and reality.
A researcher studying accuracy must therefore define what is meant by reality and what it
means to correspond to it. Both of these issues present deep conceptual challenges.
What is Reality?
A key issue that any researcher must address is the criterion problem: what is the
yardstick by which accuracy is measured? A criterion commonly used in personality
research is social consensus – agreement between two or more perceivers (one of whom
may be the self). Using this criterion, an individual may be said to accurately perceive
others (or the self) if the individual agrees with other observers.
Consensus applies differently to power than to status. In order for a group’s
consensus judgment of power to be accepted as valid, the researcher should have reason
to believe that a target person’s power over another is visible to the criterion judges. Such
an assumption may or may not be justified, depending on whose power over whom is
being assessed. At a minimum, judges must have information about the target person
being assessed and the person(s) over whom the target may or may not have power.
Additionally, in some areas power may be hidden from some group members; for
example, researchers who study privilege may have reason to suspect that members of
dominant groups are unaware of their group’s advantages over some other social groups
(Lowery et al., 2007).
Accurate When It Counts – 11
Status is a reputational construct, defined as one’s standing in the eyes of group
members. Thus, unlike with power, the social consensus of group members is the very
definition of status. If every member of a group agrees that one member has low status,
then by definition that individual has low status in that group. Some individuals within a
group may still be inaccurate, however, if they depart from the group consensus.
What is Correspondence?
The other half of the accuracy definition is correspondence. What does it mean to
say that a perception corresponds to a criterion? Cronbach (1955) presented a careful
decomposition of the different components that contribute to discrepancies between
perceptions and criterion scores. Cronbach derived the decomposition for cases where
each perceiver rates multiple target persons on multiple attributes. In a simpler
experimental design where each perceiver rates each target person on a single attribute,
we cannot distinguish all of Cronbach’s components, but we can calculate two kinds of
correspondence that carry different interpretations.
First, we can compare the average level of perceptions relative to the criterion
scores: for example, do perceivers see targets as having more power or less power than
the criterion scores indicate? Such elevation accuracy is what is implied by the notion of
overestimating versus underestimating a target’s status (and when the target is the self,
between self-enhancing versus self-effacing).2
Second, we can calculate the correlation between individual differences in
perceivers’ ratings and criterion scores: does the relative ordering of perceptions match
the relative ordering of the targets being perceived? Whereas elevation accuracy is based
Accurate When It Counts – 12
on comparisons of mean levels, differential accuracy is concerned with the rank ordering,
which is particularly relevant to hierarchically organized variables like power and status.
Elevation and correlation are logically distinct, and it is not necessary for them to
give converging results. For example, it is possible that perceivers might have little idea
as to specific targets’ relative power or status (poor differential accuracy), but they might
not be biased to form especially high or low perceptions (good elevation accuracy). It is
important to bear in mind that the two definitions of correspondence have substantively
different interpretations: elevation accuracy reflects the extent to which perceivers neither
overestimate nor underestimate; differential accuracy reflects the extent to which
perceivers know relative positioning within a hierarchy.
Are People Generally Accurate?
How accurately do people perceive power and status? In order for an attribute to
be perceived accurately, a necessary (but not sufficient) precondition is that the attribute
must be associated with cues that can be detected by observers under realistic conditions
(Funder, 1995). Power and status have a number of behavioral and appearance cues that
observers could, in principle, rely upon. Extraverted and physically attractive individuals
are more likely to attain status in groups (Anderson, John, Keltner, & Kring, 2001), and
both extraversion and physical attractiveness are associated with highly visible cues (see
Gosling, 2008, for a review). Powerful individuals experience greater positive affect, are
less behaviorally inhibited, and regulate their emotions less than less-powerful
individuals (Keltner et al., 2003; Srivastava & Ng, 2009). Trait dominance, often a
precursor to social power and status, can be accurately perceived from as little
information as a photograph, in part because individuals with dominant personalities tend
Accurate When It Counts – 13
to have distinct facial features (Berry, 1991). Thus, cues to power and status should be
available to perceivers who are able and willing to use them.
So are perceivers accurate? We believe that, when it comes to status (and in most
instances power as well), the answer is frequently yes. Specifically, we have
hypothesized that people are relatively good at perceiving status – as good or better than
they are at perceiving other attributes like Big Five personality traits and social
acceptance (Anderson et al., 2006). Status is a fundamental dimension of social
organization, and as we discuss later in this chapter, misperceiving status can carry
particularly costly social consequences (especially overestimating one’s own status
relative to others). In this section we present evidence that people are generally accurate
when perceiving status. In the next section, we discuss in more depth the motivational
reasons why people might be generally accurate. We also discuss motivational reasons
why people might sometimes be inaccurate in perceiving power and status.
Some previous research using prepared stimuli suggests that perceptions of
others’ status may be accurate, even when perceptions are based on little information. For
example, research on the Interpersonal Perception Test shows that perceivers agree with a
criterion measure better than chance when judging status from videotapes (Costanzo &
Archer, 1989). Similarly, in Schmid Mast and Hall (2004), participants who looked only
at a photograph of two coworkers interacting were highly accurate in inferring which
coworker had higher status. Other studies have looked at status judgments or cues in
relation to traits that, theoretically, should be antecedents to status. For example, one
study used videotapes of naturalistic dyadic interactions and found that judgments of
assertive behavior were significantly correlated with the targets’ trait assertiveness
Accurate When It Counts – 14
(Schmid Mast, Hall, Murphy, & Colvin, 2003). Another study of ad hoc social groups,
Kalma (1991) found that first impressions of trait dominance had predictive validity with
respect to the amount that targets later spoke in a group interaction (a behavior that is
highly related to status, therefore suggesting that the perceptions were accurate; Schmid
Mast, 2002). All of these studies are highly suggestive that people may be accurate in
judging status in naturalistic situations.
To more directly assess accuracy in perceiving the status of others and the self,
we conducted a study of interpersonal perceptions in a naturalistic group setting
(Anderson et al., 2006; Srivastava & Beer, 2005). Participants began the study as
strangers, and they got to know one another in small group social interactions that
occurred once a week for 4 weeks. At the end of each meeting, participants rated status
and personality in a round-robin design, wherein each participant in a group rated every
other participant in that group and also provided self-reports. Status and Big Five
personality traits were rated with single items on a scale from 0 to 10. A total of N = 152
participants, assigned to 28 separate groups of 4 to 8 participants each, completed the
study.
We analyzed the interpersonal perception data using the Social Relations Model
(SRM; Kenny, 1994; Kenny & La Voie, 1984). The SRM decomposes interpersonal
perceptions into 4 components, using the following equation:
Yi,j = G + Pi + Tj + Ri,j
In this equation, Yi,j is the rating that person i makes of person j. (For example, Ivan
might think that John is moderately high in status, so he assigns him a 7 on a scale from 0
to 10.) G is the average rating in the group being analyzed. Pi is the perceiver effect for
Accurate When It Counts – 15
person i; it is defined as the rating that person i typically assigns to others (averaged
across targets). Tj is the target effect for person j; it is defined as the rating that others
typically make of person j (averaged across perceivers). Ri,j is a residual term that
includes the relationship effect (the unique perspective that person i has of person j) plus
error.
For peer-ratings made in group settings, each group member rates an overlapping
but non-identical set of others. (For example, in a group of 3, Ivan rates John and Keith,
John rates Ivan and Keith, and Keith rates Ivan and John.) For this reason, the perceiver
and target effects cannot be calculated as simple averages. The equations for calculating
unbiased estimates of perceiver and target effects in round-robin data were derived by
Warner, Kenny, & Stoto (1979; see also Kenny, 1994).
As noted earlier, social consensus is definitional to status. Thus, we adopted
social consensus as our criterion – specifically, we operationalized “actual” status as the
mean rating given by members of the group.
Accuracy in Perceiving Others
Elevation accuracy. Because we were using social consensus as the accuracy
criterion, it would be circular to ask whether perceivers are accurate on average (since by
definition, being accurate means matching the average perceiver). However, one can ask
a related question: how much do different perceivers within a group disagree about the
base rate of status in that group? One perceiver may think that the members of her group
are mostly important and influential, whereas another perceiver in the same group may
think that the members of the group are mostly unimportant and unworthy of respect.
Such differences can be thought of as a stereotype that varies from one person to the next
Accurate When It Counts – 16
(either a stereotype of what people in general are like, or a stereotype of what the
members of this particular group are like). These stereotypes, if they exist, will contribute
to variance in the perceiver effect. Perceiver variance can also reflect other factors, such
as scale usage and global evaluation, that affect perceptions of many different attributes
(Srivastava, Guglielmo, & Beer, in press). Therefore we compared the variance in
perceiver effects of status to the variances for Big Five personality traits.
Larger perceiver variances reflect lower levels of elevation accuracy, because
they indicate more disagreement among group members about the average level of status
in that group. The perceiver variances, calculated as a proportion of total variance and
then averaged across all 4 weeks of the study, are reported in Table 1. Perceiver effects
accounted for 35% of the total variance in ratings of others’ status. This was greater than
the relative perceiver variance in ratings of extraversion and openness, and less than the
perceiver variance in ratings of conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism. In
other words, participants applied top-down stereotypes of a typical other’s status about as
much as they applied top-down stereotypes of a typical other’s personality. In terms of
elevation accuracy, participants were about as accurate when perceiving others’ status as
they were when perceiving others’ personality.
Differential accuracy. Another definition of accuracy – and one that is probably
more intuitive, especially for a hierarchically organized variable like status – is
differential accuracy. Differential accuracy is a measure of whether the rank-ordering of
perceptions corresponds to the rank-ordering of criterion scores. When comparing
perceptions of status to a social-consensus criterion, the question becomes: do perceivers
agree about who has high status and who has low status?
Accurate When It Counts – 17
In the SRM, agreement about others’ status will be reflected in target variance.
The more that different group members agree with one another about who has high status
and who has low, the greater the target variance will be as a proportion of total variance.
Target variance for ratings of status and the Big Five personality traits is shown in Table
1. For status ratings, target variance was 28% of the total variance in ratings. This was
greater than all personality traits except extraversion, a trait with such clear and
immediate behavioral cues that it can be accurately rated from still photographs of
strangers (e.g., Penton-Voak, Pound, Little, & Perrett, 2006). Thus, it appears that
differential accuracy for status perceptions is quite good in comparison to perceptions of
personality traits.
Accuracy in Perceiving the Self
In the same study, we also examined whether people are able to accurately
perceive their own status in a group setting. These findings have been reported previously
in slightly different form (Anderson et al., 2006); we summarize them here.
Elevation accuracy. Do people attribute more status to the self than they do to one
another (self-enhancement)? Do they attribute less (self-effacement)? Theories of
positive illusions have posited that self-perceptions are generally more positive than
perceptions of other people because it is adaptive to see the self in a positive light (Pfeffer
& Cialdini, 1998; Taylor & Brown, 1988). However, we hypothesized the theory of
positive illusions does not apply to status. Because it is so important to know one’s own
status in a group context, and because overestimating one’s own status carries particular
costs, we hypothesized that self-perceptions of status would either be neutral or even
slightly self-effacing.
Accurate When It Counts – 18
How do self-perceptions of status compare to perceptions of others? Table 2
shows means for self- and other-perceptions of status and Big Five personality traits.
These analyses show that participants were slightly self-effacing in their ratings of status,
with self-reports averaging about 0.40 scale points lower than other-reports (on a scale
from 0 to 10). By contrast, participants were relatively neutral in their ratings of
extraversion; and consistent with previous research, participants were self-enhancing in
their ratings of other personality traits.
Differential accuracy. Self-other agreement – that is, the correlation between self-
reported status and the group’s average rating of a person’s status (the consensus
criterion) – is shown in Table 3. Averaging correlations across all 4 weeks of the study,
self-other agreement for status was .42. This amount of agreement was close to that for
extraversion (.46) and substantially higher than all other personality traits. Thus, we
concluded that people agree where they fall in a group hierarchy as well as, or in most
cases, better than they agree with where they fall in the rank-ordering of personality
traits.
Other research. These findings also coincide with results from other studies. For
example, in follow-up research that involved a laboratory assessment of task-focused
groups and a field study of organizations, self- and peer-ratings of status did not
significantly differ in mean level, indicating elevation accuracy, and correlated highly
with each other, indicating high differential accuracy (Anderson, Gosling, & Ames,
2008). In a study of the status hierarchies that emerge on dormitory floors, we found self-
perceptions agreed substantially with peer-ratings of status on the floor, again indicating
differential accuracy (Anderson et al., 2001).
Accurate When It Counts – 19
Motivations for Accuracy:
Self-Perceived Status and the Need to Belong
Our research indicates that people generally agree with one another about the
relative ordering of status in a group setting, and have a pretty good idea about their own
place within that ordering. If anything, people show a slight tendency to self-efface – a
stark contrast to the positive illusions that people hold about a wide range of other
attributes, including personality traits, intelligence (Kruger & Dunning, 1999) and
physical attractiveness (Heine & Lehman, 1997). So what is special about status?
We have hypothesized that people are reasonably accurate in perceiving status
because misperceiving one’s own status relative to others carries social costs (Anderson
et al., 2006). Specifically, we proposed that individuals who overestimate their own place
in a status hierarchy are disliked and rejected by other group members. Humans share a
universal motivation to belong to groups (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Therefore, the
threat of rejection would create a strong incentive to perceive one’s own status
accurately. And since knowing one’s (relative) place involves both self-perception and
other-perception, this hypothesis (if correct) would explain the accuracy people exhibit in
perceptions of both self and others.
Why did we expect that groups would freeze out status self-enhancers? First,
status self-enhancement may be threatening to other group members. The hierarchical
organization of status means that when one individual claims high status, that individual
is implicitly taking status away from others (Blau, 1964). Status self-enhancers may
therefore be resented for illegitimately taking rewards or privileges that belong to others.
Second, because status hierarchies provide stability and order, social groups have an
Accurate When It Counts – 20
incentive to actively protect their hierarchies (Ridgeway, 1982; Ridgeway & Berger,
1986). As we have noted earlier, status hierarchies dictate who may do what in group
settings and help groups coordinate action. Individuals with high status are allowed to
speak more often, can be more assertive about their opinions, and can tell others what to
do (Anderson & Berdahl, 2002; Bugental & Lewis, 1999; Galinsky, Gruenfeld, & Magee,
2003). If too many individuals claim these privileges, it may be disruptive to group
processes (“too many cooks spoil the broth”).
In our research, we have found substantial support for the hypothesis that status
self-enhancement leads to social rejection (Anderson et al., 2008; Anderson et al., 2006).
Our evidence comes from studies across a variety of group settings and using a variety of
methods, including cross-sectional correlations; prospective longitudinal prediction, in
which temporal variation in status self-enhancement acted as a leading indicator of
upcoming rejection; and experimental manipulations, in which perceivers judged
vignettes describing enhancers and effacers. Across these studies, rejection has been
manifested in a variety of forms, most directly as feelings of dislike among fellow group
members. These feelings of rejection lead, in turn, to lower self-esteem among status self-
enhancers, as predicted by sociometer theory (see Leary, Tambor, Terdal, & Downs,
1995; Srivastava & Beer, 2005). In one study, rejection led to material costs for self-
enhancers, in the form of lower monetary compensation given by other members for a
group task (Anderson et al., 2008). We also found that individuals with the strongest need
to belong were the most likely to avoid status self-enhancement (Anderson et al., 2006).
Furthermore, we have found evidence for the supporting hypothesis that status
self-enhancement has a negative impact on group processes – a key reason why groups
Accurate When It Counts – 21
should reject self-enhancers. Perceivers rate status self-enhancers as more socially
disruptive (Anderson et al., 2008), and groups that contain more self-enhancers engage in
more conflict, which in turn predicts worse scores on a group problem-solving task
(Anderson et al., 2006).
If status self-enhancement is so costly, what about self-effacement: is it better to
be modest, or does effacement have costs as well? We have generally found linear effects
of enhancement versus effacement – in other words, group members have tended to like
status self-effacers in our studies. Self-effacement may signal socially desirable
selflessness, since effacers are foregoing credit for their contributions. Furthermore, self-
effacement implies that others have higher status, which others may find rewarding.
However, self-effacers may face other costs, such as the opportunity cost of leaving the
rewards of status on the table. Furthermore, low self-perceived status is associated with
lower positive affect, higher negative affect, and greater use of maladaptive emotion
regulation strategies (Srivastava & Ng, 2009). These personal costs may be more difficult
for effacers to discern or to link to their effacement, and therefore the costs may not
motivate accuracy to the same extent that the threat of social rejection does.
Motivations for Inaccuracy
Although we find that people are often reasonably accurate in perceiving status, it
is by no means the case that all people are accurate all of the time. Indeed, our data show
substantial room for inaccuracy of various kinds. In terms of elevation accuracy, although
we find that the average person does not self-enhance on status, we always find some
self-enhancers in our studies. In terms of differential accuracy, as noted in Table 2, target
variance accounts for about a quarter of the total variance in ratings of status. Even
Accurate When It Counts – 22
allowing for measurement artifacts and random error, there are probably many
substantive sources of variance besides accuracy. In this section, we consider two
motivational variables that may help explain why individuals can be inaccurate in
perceiving their own status and power.
Narcissism and Admiration
Narcissists are individuals who are motivated to maintain an unrealistically
positive self-concept (Morf & Rhodewalt, 2001). Narcissists crave others’ admiration and
affirmation, and this desire is so intense that it can lead them to engage in behaviors that
ultimately prove to be self-defeating.
Status self-enhancement appears to be one such behavior. Individuals who score
high on a measure of trait narcissism are more likely to overestimate their status in a
group setting (Anderson et al., 2008). At first this may seem paradoxical – narcissists,
perhaps more than others, want to be loved. However, narcissists have difficulty
controlling impulses and delaying gratification. “Many of narcissists’ behaviors may
provide temporary immediate gratification of their desire for recognition, but it comes at
the cost of long-term success” (Vazire & Funder, 2006, p. 155). Longitudinal research
shows that the benefits of self-enhancement are often immediate, whereas the costs can
take some time to emerge (Paulhus, 1998). When narcissists act like they are important
and influential, they may immediately, though briefly, elicit complementary deferential
behavior from others, especially in social situations with ambiguous hierarchies such as
newly formed groups (Krebs & Denton, 1997). Rejection and ostracism come later, when
the group hierarchy solidifies and group members finally realize that the narcissist’s
claims of high status are not justified. Because of this delay, narcissists may be unable to
Accurate When It Counts – 23
bring their self-perceptions in check – the social feedback that leads other people to back
off may come too late to act as a disincentive for a narcissist.
Unearned Privilege and Positive Self-Image
We began this chapter by presenting separate definitions of power and status.
Power is a structural property of social relations, whereas status is a component of
reputation. Power may be used to acquire status and vice versa, and in practice they tend
to be correlated, which is why we have largely discussed them together. However, unlike
status, power and its antecedents can be invisible – and therefore can be plausibly denied.
In this section we consider circumstances under which people may be motivated to
inaccurately perceive the privileges that give them social power.
Noted socialite Paris Hilton once told an interviewer, “I work very hard and I’ve
built this empire on my own” (Contact Music, 2008). Whether or not this is true, she
almost certainly has benefited from growing up in a family with a net worth in the
billions of dollars. However, people generally want to believe that their successes are due
to personal, rather than external, causes (Miller & Ross, 1975). They may therefore have
a strong motivation to downplay or even deny sources of privilege and power that are
given to them rather than earned. For example, legacy admissions to college – which are
unearned advantages given to the wealthy and well-connected – are the focus of much
less public attention than affirmative action programs for the disadvantaged, and legacy
admissions and other privileges are rarely discussed even by their beneficiaries (Chen &
Tyler, 2003).
In a series of experiments focusing on Whites’ perceptions of racial inequalities,
Lowery et al. (2007) tested the hypothesis that unearned privilege poses a threat to self-
Accurate When It Counts – 24
esteem. They hypothesized that framing racial inequalities as White privilege would
undermine Whites’ self-serving attributions, whereas focusing on anti-Black
discrimination would not. Lowery and colleagues showed that when White participants’
self-image was threatened, they were more likely to deny that Whites benefit from unfair
advantages (but they did not deny that Blacks are subject to unfair discrimination).
Conversely, experimentally bolstering Whites’ self-image made it easier for them to
acknowledge unearned racial privilege. In another experiment, self-image threat
diminished Whites’ willingness to acknowledge institutional racism (Unzueta & Lowery,
2008).
Perversely, denial of privilege may lead the privileged to try to maintain social
inequities. For example, when self-image threat leads Whites to deny that they benefit
from race-based advantages, they are less likely to support public policies designed to
alleviate racial inequalities (Lowery et al., 2007). Acknowledging unfair privilege seems
to be a precursor to supporting its dismantlement.
Conclusions
People are relatively accurate, though not perfectly so, when perceiving power
and status. In large part this is due to the consequences of inaccuracy, especially
overestimation of the self relative to others. Status self-enhancement leads to social
rejection, which people are generally motivated to avoid, creating a strong incentive to be
accurate. Short-term self-aggrandizement may outweigh the long-term costs for
narcissists, leading them to be systematically inaccurate. And unearned privileges may
threaten the self-image, leading individuals to distort or deny the true sources of their
social power.
Accurate When It Counts – 25
By no means do we believe this is the last word on the motivational bases of
accuracy and inaccuracy in perceptions of power and status. Our hypotheses and findings
apply best to intact groups that remain together for a significant period of time, where the
enhancement-rejection cycle has time to play out; in more transient groups this incentive
may not apply. Furthermore, other motivations are likely to be relevant. For example,
individuals with a strong need for power may have an incentive to accurately perceive
and understand the hierarchies that they wish to climb. Conversely, individuals or groups
with egalitarian or anarchistic values may find it aversive or threatening to acknowledge
the existence of any hierarchy at all. We expect that a variety of other motivations, yet to
be discovered, will help explain when and why people try to figure out who stands where
in social groups.
Accurate When It Counts – 26
Footnotes
1. In developmental psychology, the term “status” is sometimes used in a different
way to refer to sociometric status – the extent to which one is liked and/or disliked by
peers. That is not the meaning we are invoking here
2. In Cronbach’s (1955) more elaborate framework, some of his components
would affect the elevation of perceptions of all attributes, and other components would
only affect the elevation of a single attribute. Short of collecting and analyzing data in a
full Cronbach-type design, it is useful to compare elevation for different attributes; this
can help in distinguishing elevating effects due to general processes like acquiescence
bias from elevation effects that are particular to a single attribute like status.
Accurate When It Counts – 27
References
Adcock, S. (2003). 30 Things Everyone Should Know How To Do Before Turning 30.
New York: Broadway Books.
Allen, A. (2008). Feminist perspectives on power. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 edition). Retrieved from
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminist-power/.
Anderson, C. P., Ames, D. R., & Gosling, S. D. (2008). Punishing hubris: The perils of
status self-enhancement in teams and organizations. Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin, 34, 90-101.
Anderson, C., & Berdahl, J. L. (2002). The experience of power: Examining the effects
of power on approach and inhibition tendencies. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 83, 1362–1377.
Anderson, C., John, O. P., Keltner, D., & Kring, A. M. (2001). Who attains social status?
Effects of personality traits and physical attractiveness in social groups. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 116–132.
Anderson, C., Srivastava, S., Beer, J. S., Spataro, S. E., & Chatman, J. E. (2006).
Knowing your place: Self-perceptions of status in social groups. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 1094-1110.
Bakan, D. (1966). The duality of human existence: Isolation and communion in Western
man. Boston: Beacon.
Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal
attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117,
497–529.
Accurate When It Counts – 28
Berger, J., Cohen, B. P., & Zelditch, M. (1972). Status characteristics and social
interaction. American Sociological Review, 37, 241-255.
Berry. D. S. (1991). Accuracy in social perception: Contributions of facial and vocal
information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 298-307.
Blau, P. M. (1964). Exchange and power in social life. New York: Wiley.
Bugental, D. B., & Lewis, J. C. (1999). The paradoxical misuse of power by those who
see themselves as powerless: How does it happen? Journal of Social Issues, 55,
51–64.
Costanzo, M., & Archer, D. (1989). Interpreting the expressive behavior of others: The
interpersonal perception task. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 13, 225-245.
Chen, E. S., & Tyler, T. R. (2003). Cloaking power: Legitimizing myths and the
psychology of the advantaged. In A. Y. Lee-Chai & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), The use
and abuse of power: Multiple perspectives on the causes of corruption (pp. 241-
261). Philadelphia: Psychology Press.
Contact Music (2008). “Paris Hilton – ‘I work hard for my money.’” Retrieved from
http://www.contactmusic.com/news.nsf/story/hilton-i-work-hard-for-my-
money_1063935.
Cronbach, L. J. (1955). Processes affecting scores on “understanding others” and
“assumed similarity.” Psychological Bulletin, 52, 177-193.
de Vries, H. (1998). Finding a dominance order most consistent with linear hierarchy: A
new procedure and review. Animal Behavior, 55, 827-843.
Accurate When It Counts – 29
Dryer, D. C., & Horowitz, L. M. (1997). When do opposites attract? Interpersonal
complementarity versus similarity. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology,
72, 592--603.
Emerson, R. M. (1962). Power dependence relations. American Sociological Review, 27,
31–41.
Fiske, S. & Berdahl, J. L. (2007). Social power. E. T. Higgins & A. W. Kruglanski
(Eds.), Social Psychology: Handbook of Basic Principles. Oxford University
Press.
Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J., Glick, P., & Xu, J. (2002). A model of (often mixed)
stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived
status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 878-
902.
Foa, U. G., & Foa, E. B. (1974) Societal structures of the mind. Springfield, IL: Charles
C. Thomas.
Funder, D. C. (1995). On the accuracy of personality judgment: A realistic approach.
Psychological Review, 102, 652-670.
Funder, D.C., & Colvin, C.R. (1991). Explorations in behavioral consistency: Properties
of persons, situations, and behaviors. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 60, 773-794.
Galinsky, A. D., Gruenfeld, D. H., & Magee, J. C. (2003). From power to action. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 453–466.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Accurate When It Counts – 30
Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual. New York: Anchor Books.
Gosling, S. (2008). Snoop: What your stuff says about you. New York: Basic Books.
Gough, H. G., McCloskey, H., & Meehl, P. E. (1951). A personality scale for dominance.
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 46, 360-366.
Heine, S. J., & Lehman, D. R. (1997). The cultural construction of self-enhancement: An
examination of group-serving biases. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 72, 1268–1283.
Hogan, R. (1983). A socioanalytic theory of personality. In M. M. Page (Ed.), Nebraska
symposium on motivation, 1982 (pp. 55-89). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska
Press.
Horowitz, L.M., Wilson, K.R., Turan, B., Zolotsec, P., Constantino, M. J., & Henderson,
L. (2006). How interpersonal motives clarify the meaning of interpersonal
behavior: a revised circumplex model. Personality and Social Psychology Review,
10, 67-86.
John, O. P., & Srivastava, S. (1999). The Big Five trait taxonomy: History, measurement,
and theoretical perspectives. In L. A. Pervin & O. P. John (Eds.), Handbook of
personality: Theory and research (2nd ed., pp. 102-138). New York: Guilford.
Kalma, A. (1991). Hierarchisation and dominance assessment at first glance. European
Journal of Social Psychology, 21, 165-181.
Kelley, H. H. and Thibaut, J. (1978) Interpersonal relations: A theory of
interdependence, New York: Wiley.
Kenny, D. A. (1994). Interpersonal perception: A social relations analysis. New York:
Guilford.
Accurate When It Counts – 31
Kenny, D. A., & Albright, L. (1987). Accuracy in interpersonal perception: A social-
relations analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 102, 390-402.
Kenny, D. A., & La Voie, L. (1984). The social relations model. Advances in
Experimental Social Psychology, 18, 141-182.
Keltner, D. Gruenfeld, D. H. & Anderson, C. (2003). Power, approach, and inhibition.
Psychological Review, 110, 265-284.
Krebs, D. L., & Denton, K. (1997). Social illusions and self-deception: The evolution of
biases in person perception. In J. A. Simpson & D. T. Kenrick (Eds.),
Evolutionary social psychology (pp. 21–48). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in
recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 1121–1134.
Kruglanski, A. W. (1989). The Psychology of being "right": On the problem of accuracy
in social perception and cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 106, 395-409.
Leary, M. R., Tambor, E. S., Terdal, S. K., & Downs, D. L. (1995). Self-esteem as an
interpersonal monitor: The sociometer hypothesis. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 68, 518-530.
Lowery, B. S., Knowles, E. D, & Unzueta, M. M. (2007). Framing inequity safely: The
motivated denial of White privilege. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,
33, 1237-1250.
Markey, P.M., Funder, D.C., & Ozer, D.J. (2003). Complementarity of interpersonal
behaviors in dyadic interactions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29,
1082-1090.
Accurate When It Counts – 32
McAdams, D. P. (1985). Power, intimacy, and the life story: Personological inquiries
into identity. New York: Guilford.
McIntosh, P. (1988). White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming
to see correspondences through work in women’s studies (Working Paper No.
189). Wellesley, MA: Wellesley Centers for Women.
Miller, D. T., & Ross, M. (1975). Self-serving biases in the attribution of causality: Fact
or fiction? Psychological Bulletin, 82, 213-225.
Morf, C. C., & Rhodewalt, F. (2001). Unraveling the paradoxes of narcissism: A dynamic
self-regulatory processing model. Psychological Inquiry, 12, 177–196.
O'Connor, B. P., & Dyce, J. A. (1997). Interpersonal rigidity, hostility, and
complementarity in musical bands. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
72, 362-372.
Owens, D. A., & Sutton, R. I. (1999). Status contests in meetings: Negotiating the
informal order. In D. A. Owens and R. I. Sutton (Eds.), Groups at work:
Advances in theory and research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Paulhus, D. L. (1998). Interpersonal and intrapsychic adaptiveness of trait self-
enhancement: A mixed blessing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
74, 1197–1208.
Penton-Voak, I. S., Pound, N., Little, A. C., & Perrett, D.I. (2006) Personality
judgments from natural and composite facial images: more evidence for a
“kernel of truth” in social perception. Social Cognition, 24, 490-524.
Pfeffer, J., & Cialdini, R. B. (1998). Illusions of influence. In R. M. Kramer & M.
A. Neale (Eds.), Power and influence in organizations (pp. 1–20).
Accurate When It Counts – 33
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Ridgeway, C. L. (1987). Nonverbal behavior, dominance, and the basis of status
in task groups. American Sociological Review, 52, 683–694.
Ridgeway, C. L., & Berger, J. (1986). Expectations, legitimation, and dominance
behavior in task groups. American Sociological Review, 51, 603–617.
Robins, R. W., & John, O. P. (1997). The quest for self-insight: Theory and
research on accuracy and bias in self-perception. In R. T. Hogan, J. A.
Johnson, & S. R. Briggs (Eds.), Handbook of personality psychology (pp.
649-679). New York: Academic Press.
Rusbult, C. E., & Van Lange, P. A. M. (2003). Interdependence, interaction, and
relationships. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 351-375.
Savin-Williams, R. C. (1979). Dominance hierarchies in groups of early adolescents.
Child Development, 50, 923-935.
Schmid Mast, M. (2002). Dominance expressed in speaking time and inferred dominance
based on speaking time: A meta-analysis. Human Communication Research, 28,
420–450.
Schmid Mast, M., & Hall, J. A. (2004). Who is the boss and who is not? Accuracy of
judging status. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 28, 145-165.
Schmid Mast, M., Hall, J. A., Murphy, N. A., & Colvin, C. R. (2003). Judging
assertiveness. Facta Universitatis, 2, 731-744.
Sluckin, A. M., & Smith, P. K. (1977). Two approaches to the concept of dominance in
school children. Child Development, 48, 917-923.
Accurate When It Counts – 34
Srivastava, S., & Beer, J. S. (2005). How self-evaluations relate to being liked by others:
Integrating sociometer and attachment perspectives. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 89, 966-977.
Srivastava, S., Guglielmo, S., & Beer, J. S. (in press). Perceiving others’ personalities:
Examining the dimensionality, assumed similarity to the self, and stability of
perceiver effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Srivastava, S., & Ng, C. W. (2009). Power, Emotions, and Emotion Regulation: Situation
and Person Effects in Two Cultures. Unpublished manuscript.
Surowiecki, J. (2004). The wisdom of crowds. New York: Random House.
Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. D. (1988). Illusion and well-being: A social psychological
perspective on mental health. Psychological Bulletin, 103, 193–210.
Thibaut, J. W., & Kelley, H. H. (1959). The social psychology of groups. New York:
Wiley.
Tiedens, L. Z., & Fragale, A. R. (2003). Power moves: Complementarity in dominant and
submissive nonverbal behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
84, 558-568.
Unzueta, M. M. & Lowery, B. S. (2008). Defining racism safely: The role of self-image
maintenance on White Americans' conceptions of racism. Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 1491-1497.
Vazire, S., & Funder, D. C. (2006). Impulsivity and the self-defeating behavior of
narcissists. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10, 154-165.
Accurate When It Counts – 35
Warner, R., Kenny, D. A., & Stoto, M. (1979). A new round robin analysis of variance
for social interaction data. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37,
1742-1757.
Wiggins, J. S. (1991). Agency and communion as conceptual coordinates for the
understanding and measurement of interpersonal behavior. In W. M. Grove & D.
Ciccetti (Eds.), Thinking clearly about psychology: Vol. 2. Personality and
psychopathology (pp. 89-113). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Accurate When It Counts – 36
Table 1
Relative Perceiver and Target Variances in Status and Big Five Personality Traits
Perceiver variance Target variance
Status .35 .28
Openness .31 .17
Conscientiousness .44 .09
Extraversion .21 .41
Agreeableness .38 .11
Neuroticism .54 .07
Note. N = 152. Data are averages from 4 measurement occasions. Perceiver variance is an
index of disagreement about the average elevation other persons. Target variance is an
index of agreement about the rank-ordering of other persons.
Accurate When It Counts – 37
Table 2
Self-Other Agreement for Status and Big Five Personality Traits
Self-perception mean
Other-perception mean
Self minus target (95% C.I.)
Status 5.32 5.72 -0.40 (-0.65, -0.15)
Openness 7.35 6.00 1.34 (1.08, 1.60)
Conscientiousness 7.39 6.33 1.06 (0.84, 1.28)
Extraversion 6.02 5.94 0.08 (-0.21, 0.37)
Agreeableness 7.10 6.38 0.72 (0.47, 0.96)
Neuroticism 4.40 3.58 0.82 (0.56, 1.09)
Note. N = 152 persons in 28 groups. Data were averaged across 4 measurement
occasions. Because of group dependencies in the data, confidence intervals were
calculated at the group level of analysis, not the individual level.
Accurate When It Counts – 38
Table 3
Self-Other Agreement for Status and Big Five Personality Traits
Self-other agreement
Status .42
Openness .24
Conscientiousness .08
Extraversion .46
Agreeableness .22
Neuroticism .20
Note. N = 152. Data are averages from 4 measurement occasions.